Kategoria BISAC: History >> United States - State & Local - West (AK, CA, CO, HI, ID, MT, NV, UT, WY)

From King Cane to the Last Sugar Mill focuses on the technological and scientific advances that allowed Hawai'i's sugar industry to become a world leader and Hawaiian Commercial & Sugar Company (HC&S) to survive into the twenty-first century. The authors, both agricultural scientists, offer a detailed history of the industry and its contributions, balanced with discussion of the enormous societal and environmental changes due to its aggressive search for labor, land, and water.

Sugarcane cultivation in Hawai'i began with the arrival of Polynesian settlers, expanded into a commercial...

In the history of the American frontier, John Sutter (1803-1880) looms large. A Swiss expatriate who attempted to create a personal empire in California's Sacramento Valley, he founded New Helvetia, a cosmopolitan settlement whose economy depended on Indian slaves and free laborers. New Helvetia drew overland immigrants to California in the 1840s and then--after gold was discovered by Sutter's employees--a flood of fortune seekers. Sutter was poised to become one of the richest men in the West, but rapacious settlers and his own poor business sense sent his dreams crashing.

Albert...

Dave Shoji, legendary coach for the University of Hawai'i women's volleyball program, looks back at four decades of coaching to tell his story along with that of the Rainbow Wahine, four-time national champions and consistently among the top-ranked teams in college sports. With the assistance of longtime beat writer Ann Miller, Shoji provides an exclusive look at the state's perennially successful athletic team. His memoir traces the history and rise of the program--from 1975, when he was hired as a part-time coach by women's athletic director Donnis Thompson and matches were held in the...

Environmentalists and the timber industry do not often collaborate, but in the years immediately following gray wolf reintroduction in the interior American West, a plan to reintroduce grizzly bears to the Selway-Bitterroot Wilderness of Idaho and Montana brought these odd bedfellows together. The partnership won praise from diverse interests across the country and in 2000 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service approved a plan for reintroduction. When the Bush Administration took office, however, it promptly shelved the project.

In Grizzly West Michael J. Dax explores the...

Bayonets in Paradise recounts the extraordinary story of how the army imposed rigid and absolute control on the total population of Hawaii during World War II. Declared immediately after the Pearl Harbor attack, martial law was all-inclusive, bringing under army rule every aspect of the Territory of Hawaii's laws and governmental institutions. Even the judiciary was placed under direct subservience to the military authorities. The result was a protracted crisis in civil liberties, as the army subjected more than 400,000 civilians--citizens and alien residents alike--to sweeping, intrusive...

During the 1885 to 1924 immigration period of plantation laborers from Japan to Hawaii, more than 200,000 Japanese, mostly single men, made the long journey by ship to the Hawaiian Islands. As it became apparent that they would never return to Japan, many of the men sent for brides to join them in their adopted home. More than 20,000 of these picture brides immigrated from Japan and Okinawa to Hawaii to marry husbands whom they knew only through photographs exchanged between them or their families.

Based on Barbara Kawakami's first-hand interviews with sixteen of these women, Picture...